29 March, 2010

There is a palpable level of frustration for the Catholic faithful with the latest allegations of child abuse by Catholic priests not only in the United States but worldwide.

What's interesting to observe is that unlike the previous Pope John Paul II, this time around the heat may be proving too damaging for the current pope, Pope Benedict XVI.

While opening Holy Week celebrating Palm Sunday, he made vague references to the controversy brewing over how much he actually knew about a priest accused of molesting deaf boys in the United States while he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and if he personally did anything to cover it up.

A 2004 John Jay Report commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is illuminating. The report was based on secret interviews done with US priests accused of child abuse and with their alleged victims. Between 1950 and 2002, there were 10,667 allegations of child sexual abuse. 3,300 of these were not investigated because the priests in question had died. Of the remaining 7,700 accusations, 6,700 were substantiated against 4,392 priests. However, according to the report, only 384 of these priests were prosecuted, 252 convicted, and 100 sent to prison.

The total number of allegations and the miniscule total number of successful prosecutions are astonishing. While the numbers tell only one side of the story, implied is the level of secrecy, cover-ups and civil settlements made by the Catholic church to its victims.

Again, some more numbers may be in order.

To give but one example. Between 1992 and 2002, the Boston Globe reported that the Archdiocese of Boston secretly settled child abuse claims for at least 70 priests. That is only part of a much larger, and tragic, story for dioceses in the United States have paid more than 2.6 billion dollars to settle out of courts cases stemming from priestly impropriety with minor boys.

But back to Joseph Ratzinger, or Pope Benedict XVI.

Absent from all the recent scandals about how much he may have personally done to cover-up allegations of priestly abuse while he was cardinal and archbishop is a 2005 case from Texas that has received almost no media attention these days. (In fact, in 2005 in didn't receive much attention either, which is a shame.)

Juan Carlos Patino-Arango was a seminarian who, while studying in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houaston in Texas, was accused of molesting three boys. Eventually the case was settle though the seminarian was indicted on a felony charge of indecency with a child.

If you think that's all, you're in for a surprise because for the first time in recent history, Joseph Ratzinger, our beloved Pope Benedict XVI, was personally named and accused in the lawsuit of conspiring to cover up the molestation charges.

Lawyers for the Pontiff immediately went into action, asking then President George W. Bush to grant the pope diplomatic immunity because, as the memo says, he is a head of state. Bush granted the immunity.

At issue, I think, is not that a head of state be granted diplomatic immunity, but that once again the pope seemed to be so close to the secrecy and conspiratorial proceedings in child abuse cases that has damned the Catholic Church in the eyes of many.

Attorney Daniel Shea, who identified his clients in legal documents as John Does I, II, III, told newspaper reports that then Cardinal Ratzinger, who at that time was heading the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was personally involved in the conspiracy to hide the crime of the seminarian. The attorney pointed out to a letter written in 2001 by the cardinal to bishops asking them that during church proceedings of sexual abuse molestation cases, to make handle them with “pontifical secret.”

Which brings us to the present church scandals of which the now Pope Benedict XVI seems to be embroiled in. How could he not have known about the abuses perpetrated by priests against children? I ask this question not to jump on the bandwagon of the many vocal critics of the pope in particular or of the Catholic Church more generally. I think the problem is more endemic than that since it is a structural one, where secrecy above transparency is a cardinal rule; where millenia of medieval, scholastic church dogma trumpets modernism; and where priests, all of whom pledge to be celibate, seem to find a escapist mechanism to deal with their repressed sexuality by overwhelmingly abusing defenseless boys.

Until the church makes badly-needed changes to its modus operandi, we will continue to hear the sporadic allegations of child abuse stemming from and by an institution that can least afford to sustain such stigma in modern times. How much the Catholic Church can continue to operate without doing irreparable damage to its legitimacy at a time when all these scandals seem to be so close to the see of power itself is one to observe with an admixture of fascination and disbelief from now on.

16 March, 2010

The health care reform seems to be gaining steam now that a final bill seems imminent.

While the news media will bombard us with intricate information about the technicalities of a possible final package (leaving many of us still in the dark about what it will cover and won't cover) absent from all this talk are the everyday, existential struggles endured by the near 30 million men and women from every walk of life without health care insurance or with little access to the health care system.

I have often said that Middle Class America is poorer than anyone may think. Take into account huge debts, joblessness and foreclosures, and you know what I mean. On top of this, while some economic predictors seem to paint a rosy picture of the future, the greatest number of economists and analysts agree that the end of our economic crisis is far from over. In fact, just today I read somewhere that in the next two years we will see a new cycle of foreclosures.

The newly dispossed are all around you and their numbers will continue to increase. Just look around and you, too, will see.

Which is why not long ago I decided to visit Jackson Memorial Hospital, one of the largest public health care providers in Florida, and see for myself how our hospitals actually do business with our sickness. If you live in South Florida, chances are you already know about the crisis this hospital is facing. For 2010 fiscal year, Jackson Memorial Hospital will have a $229.4 million dollar deficit. Much worse for the local economy, it has threatened to lay off about 4,487 of its employees unless it doesn't get an infusion of capital from state and local governments, both of which have refused to do thus far.

Like 30 million, 4,487 is also a critically high number of unemployed people for any community to absorb at any given point.

But that's what we're facing. More people unemployed than ever before, and the cost of health care higher than ever. More people losing their health care coverage if they had any, while many more have no say in this important discussion.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2009 federal lobbyists and their clients spent more than $3.47 billion trying to influence legislation of all sorts.

Ironically, the only sector in our economic sector that doesn't seem affected by the economic crisis is the lobbying industry. I don't want to harp on more of the same, but here it is. How's this for a shock? According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2009 federal lobbyists and their clients spent more than $3.47 billion trying to influence legislation of all sorts. Out of that, the pharmaceutical and health lobbyists spent by far the largest, with an average total of more than $267 million.

Be not surprised, then, that whatever health care reform is passed won't be as far-reaching, as all encompassing, or as geared towards competition between a public and a private plan as it once was hoped for. That's a shame because this health care reform could have been another truly historic piece of legislation. Time will tell, though. Let's not be so negative.

But how does this, I ask, affect those many uninsured? like the many people I met the day I visited the local public hospital.

While I was pleased with the general level of caring Jackson Memorial Hospital provides the poor and indigent, what I was mostly amazed to see were so many I call "the newly poor", or people who had never experienced long-term job loss, had ever been recipients of unemployment benefits, food stamps, or had ever faced the calamity of foreclosures.

But here they were, hundreds of people who had come with the hopes of being seeing by a physician, a nurse, anyone who could tell them what was wrong with them. For some, this was not the first time here so they knew what to expect, a pathetic bureaucracy. For others, this was their first time and to say that they were in for a surprise doesn't do justice to their shock.

In more than three hours, I met and talked to a wide number of families from the South Florida community. Most of their stories were similar in nature, and none had anything nice to say about the health care system.

Take for example Miguel, a 60 something Cuban man. Ever since he came to the US in 1982, he worked as
an independent electrician but for the last two years his job offers have dwindled to almost half of what he used to make. Right now what he makes is unsustainable. His wife Maria is of similar age, a housewife, with that piqued look of a person who has never been exposed to so much bureaucracy and, from what I could see, she was beginning to lose patience; a futility of emotion many who had been through this hospital before had mastered with stoic resignation, but one Maria had yet to master.

Miguel had begun to bleed through his rectum. He was afraid he had cancer. At his age, anything was possible as he told me. He had gone to a local clinic which had immediately referred to a specialist at Jackson. That specialist, as he was told today, had a waiting list of about a year. Not even if Miguel's case was of an emergency, could he see the specialist before a six months period.

Their choices, of course, were very limited. They can hardly pay $200, cash, to see a private physician, much less pay for the cost of all other medical procedures that would be required. They were at a loss. One thing was certain, though, they had to wait.

There was another woman with a pea-sized brain tumor. Her name is Ana. Though it was best to operate the tumor as soon as possible, the waiting time was three months and not a day before. In between the original diagnosis and the day I met her, three months had already elapsed. Her symptoms were typical: she felt nauseous most of the time, passed out at regular intervals, and her headaches were becoming increasingly more excrutiating. She lived with her 84-year old mother, whose meagre social security benefits were $182.00 a month, and a nephew she had raised as a son and who seemed to be the only breadwinner in the family. He works at two jobs now just so that they can pay a $950 a month rent. Ana had been fired from her job as a waitress at a local cafeteria in Hialeah (a local municipality in Miami) because she had passed out too many times and the owner of the cafeteria was afraid of a possible lawsuit.

When I asked Ana what she intended to do, I kid you not, she told me she was thinking of going to Cuba to have the brain operation. "At least it's free over there and I can stay with family members," she told me with a shrug. "I already sold all my jewelry in order to buy a plane ticket to Havana."

So, as we discuss the reasons why we should or shouldn't have universal health care, just drive to a local hospital yourself. Talk to the people. Let them tell you their stories. And while you're talking to them be reminded that one of them could be you one day.